Sign Here(88)

“I just—I want you to know that I really do love you.”

“That’s good.”

Ruth pulled her fingers through Mickey’s wet hair, leaving touches like insects on her forehead and shoulders. Each blink felt longer than the last. She couldn’t understand how anyone could function normally under this thick of a sweater.

“I’m sorry,” Ruth said. “I’m so sorry.”

And that time, when Mickey’s eyes closed, they stayed that way.





PEYOTE





IN THE BOX WERE stacks of sixteen-millimeter film reels, each labeled with two names and a date. Cal pulled the first one out and held it up to the light, and I reached for the yellowed notebook wedged into one side. It was a financial ledger. Dates and names on the left, with initials and amounts on the right. It was meticulous, always the same blue ink.

“What are they?” I asked, even though I thought of all the General had learned at the hands of Father Michael, and I knew.

Cal flipped through a few of the reels and then closed the box. I heard a sound from the bed and looked over to see the General staring at us, one soft hand gripping the severed wires of the call button.

“You know what I thought about all those millennia in the Downstairs?” Cal said, turning back to him, ledger in hand. “Every time I refused water, even after they replaced my insides with my outsides and set fire to my throat with a blowtorch? I thought to myself, What motive would you have to lie? You must’ve known what you were talking about.”

She came to a stop in front of the bed, and the General’s eyes went as wild as a horse’s in the last corner of a barn fire.

“And as the centuries went by, I started to think maybe you were wrong, but you must’ve at least believed you were right. It’s not like you were getting anything out of those blistering days in the sun, training us.”

Cal leaned in and took his pajama top in her fist, lifting his head and shoulders clear off the pillows.

“?‘Jonah versus Isaac, November 18, 1932,’?” she read out loud. “?‘C.M. Twenty-five dollars.’?”

Cal surprised the General when she laughed, but not me.

“Twenty-five dollars? That’s how much you charged C.M. to watch Jonah murder Isaac? I remember that match, Pops. Isaac was about to win when Jonah threw sand in his eyes. Remember? And then he got Isaac’s mouth around that wood fence post, managed to slam down hard enough to damn near rip off his jaw. That was a bloody one. Only worth twenty-five dollars? You didn’t upcharge when the dead kid was under thirteen? Bad business.”

“Cal—” I started, and that’s when she threw the notebook to the floor and climbed on top of him.

I understood why Cal wanted to kill him herself. I understood why, as she took his throat in her hands and squeezed, she would want to be the one he saw as he realized this was how it ended. His thirst for power had nothing to do with honor or responsibility. He wanted power the way a plagiarist wants credit: the concept of pride gained from work was meaningless. The people who hurt children are always this particular brand of coward. I saw countless of them on the belt. The kind who know they can’t get what they want on merit, who know their overall worth is less than their parts. And yet they feel power is owed to them anyway. So they siphon their power out of the weakest bodies ounce by thimble-ounce, sucking out every last drop. And then they pretend they earned it; that the bulk they swallowed—they stole—somehow makes them whole.

But she wasn’t like him. Even after all the hell, figurative and literal, he put her through. She was better.

“Cal!” I shouted, getting my arms around her shoulders and wrenching her free.

“Get the fuck off me!” she screamed. But when she shook me off, she fell against the wall and not over the General, who gasped and sputtered, blood and spit like a getaway rope dangling from his bottom lip.





SILAS





SILAS PARKED IN THE woods, over where Phil used to park before their folks knew about the bike. When he cut the engine and stepped off, the sponge of the forest floor forced him to lean against a tree to catch his balance. He pulled the bottle from the cupholder, only to find it empty. He pitched back and chucked it against a tree. The glass shattered, but he missed the glory of the sparkle out there in the dark.

He wanted the night air to be cool, but it wasn’t. He would’ve even settled for scorching hot, but it refused to be that either, settling instead on the clammy warmth of abandoned tea or an end-of-a-long-day handshake. He wanted to inhale air that brought with it a new feeling, a new temperature. Something that would distinguish what came before from what came after Lily’s words. He wished the atmosphere were something he could hit. He wished it had a face he could bruise. But there was nothing around him but space and stars.

Just like the night Sarah died.

He hadn’t used a flashlight to get to the clearing that night either. They snuck out after Lily passed out, walking separately past the party diehards, the stragglers with half-lid eyes and loud voices that slipped on their vowels. They didn’t acknowledge each other until they were safely in the dark of the woods, but as soon as they crossed that threshold, their hands went everywhere.

“Is everything okay with the lady of the house?” Sarah asked when she pulled her mouth from his.